The Brides of Rollrock Island (3 page)

“Gussy,” said Dad.

“Tell me it isn’t true, then,” said Mam. “She won’t miss us and I won’t grieve after her.”

He shrugged and looked away, and the matter seemed done with. But Mam did not look down at me, and her grip was tight and wrenching of my shoulder, as if I ought to be punished rather than consoled.

“You see?” said Bee.

“I don’t,” said Tatty. “Which stone is it, even?”

Neither could I see. I stood away from the garth wall. The stones, in the lumpiest part above the gate, looked even more higgledy-piggledy in this slant of light.

“The seal head is fallen away
that
side of the maiden.” Lorel waved to the left and then to the right. “See the skin of it, along and across, those three lines coming to the point, then to the little tail?”

“The tail is almost worn right away,” said Bee.

“Oh,
that
is the tail, is it?” said Tatty doubtfully.

“And so the maiden is
rising out
of the skin, you see? And her beautiful hair? That is all those whirls—though Nanny Paul used to say
her
nanny told her that all their hairs were flat as boards, not a kink or curl among them.”

“She has a big head,” I said. “And hardly any body at all.”

“See, Tat? Even
Missk
can see her,” said Grassy.

“A head and a bosom.” Billy chewed a grass stalk, slumped against the opposite wall. Lorel laughed dirtily. The circles of the stone bosoms popped out at me, the peck marks of the nipples. My face went hot. Imagine carving such a thing, for all to see!

“She doesn’t look a very happy maiden,” said Tatty, “to be come to live among us.”

“Oh, they were right miseries, everyone says,” said Grassy.

“Everyone?” said Bee. “Who have you heard say? I cannot get anyone to talk for long about it. Mam closes up like a trap, and Dad will find something he must be busy with. And Nanny Paul, sometimes she would rattle on as long as you liked, but most often she would only put up her eyebrows, insulted.”

“Maybe it’s
boring
for them,” groaned Billy. “Seeing as it never happens anymore.”

“There’s nothing keeping you here, Billy,” said Bee crisply. “Go and kick footer if you’re so bored of us.”

“Plenty say it never happened at all, girls coming out of seals,” said Lorel.

“Well, how could it?” said Tatty. “It would be like a cat birthing a dog, or a horse throwing a goat.”

“There’s no birthing of it at all,” said Ann Jelly. “It is the same creature. Only its skin comes off and the girl is within.”

“Oh, pfft,” said Tatty. “Whoever heard of such a thing?”

“I’ve heard of it,” said Grassy. “What’s wrong with
your
ears?”

“And you
hide
that skin,” said Bee darkly. “For if she finds it, she snatches it up and is gone, no matter how nicely you’ve treated her, no matter how many children she’s had on the land.”

“She will abandon her
children
?” said Ann Jelly, and I was shocked too. I knew Mam didn’t like us, but I couldn’t imagine her leaving us. We eyed the bosomy woman high on the wall. She stared out unashamed.

“As if they never were,” said Bee. “And never come back to visit them either.”

“What dreadful creatures,” said Lorel. “What would a man ever want with one of those?”

Ann Jelly and I sat with Gert along Strangleholds’ step, in the sunshine.

“Slide aside,” said Gert’s mam. “I must go down to May’s and get those eggs. Stay about till I’m back, Gert. I’ll not be blamed for letting Prouts’ little one wander off.”

We let her through and watched her hurry along the lane. She paused to greet Ardle Staines’s mam, then continued on around the corner.

“I’ll show you something.” Gert scrambled up.

Ann Jelly made eyebrows at me and jumped up too.

After the sunshine, all I could see in the house was the window through the back. Gert’s parents’ bedroom was quite black, the two girls hissing and giggling in there. I stepped in and waited, and their shapes emerged, shadows bent over a chest with its lid open against the wall.

“Don’t move anything,” said Gert. “It’s right at the back here. Hold the clothes and blankets away so it doesn’t catch on them.”

The back of the chest seemed to come away in her hands. She pulled it up. Then she tipped it, and I saw the wire by which it had once hung on a wall, and the glass front reflecting the curtain edge with its bit of trapped light.

They bent over the picture.

“It’s a person,” said Ann Jelly.

“A lady,” said Gert.

“I can’t see anything,” I said.

Gert pulled the curtains a little apart. I edged in next to Ann Jelly. The lady’s eyes were large in her face, and dark. She looked as if she had suffered a great shock and was staring from it, not seeing us, waiting for an explanation.

“Who is she?” said Ann Jelly.

“She’s an ancestor.”

“But she looks like no one! None of you have those eyes, or that hair either.”

“It fades out quick, says Mam, that look. The red takes back over—thank heaven, she says.”

I had seen that mouth before. I had fingered it in front of the mirror; I had pressed the lips tightly closed as I was doing now, so they would not show so much. But if I had had
that
face around my lips, they would have been beautiful; they would have fitted with the other features, and been nothing to be ashamed of at all.

“Why don’t you have her on the wall?” I reached out and rattled the wire. “She is all ready for hanging.”

“She’s a secret, Mam says. She is our greatest shame. She must stay hidden away.”

“What’s her name?” said Ann Jelly.

“No one remembers, she’s so long ago in our family. Isn’t she beautiful?”

“She looks like a Spanish queen,” said Ann Jelly thoughtfully. “Out of Mister Wexford’s storybook, up at school.”

“Yes!” Gert sounded pleased. “Perhaps she was royal there, under the sea.”

They pulled the curtains wider, examined the woman more closely. “Her delicate hands,” said Ann Jelly.

“See, they have made her smile here, just a little?” Gert waved a finger over the lips in the painting, and I bit my own away again. “But her eyes are still sad.” She covered the curvy mouth; the eyes gazed out mournfully over the edge of her hand.

“We must put her away. Mam mustn’t know I showed you. And you mustn’t tell—Misskaella won’t tell, will she?”

“Not if I tell her not to.” Ann Jelly widened her eyes at me.

“I won’t say a word.” But she didn’t need to caution me. I had not the words or the worldliness to describe the Spanish-queen lady, and how new she was to me, yet how familiar.

They slid the picture back down behind the blankets, and closed the lid; I pretended to help, although I was really too small to be of much use. I only wanted the chance to touch the wood, so old, so ornamented—the perfect container for a secret. My plump little hand looked so impertinent among the carved flowers! I snatched it away.

We went out and sat as we’d sat before, along the step. We hardly spoke until Gert’s mam came back, and called us monkeys in a row, and freed us to run off and play. Gladly we sprang away from our naughtiness and solemnity, and from the stare of the lady in the picture.

Some months after my ninth birthday, I woke one day to find everything stretched and reaching, as if the world were a pot on the boil and someone had taken its lid off and let the steam pour up wildly. I must be ill, I thought, but I felt no pain, no turmoil of my stomach, and I could get up and move about much as I always did. No one else seemed to notice how high or heightened everything had gone, how the essence of things rushed and flapped in my heart. My sisters chattered among themselves as usual, cried at me to hurry along.

When it came my turn to cross the threshold to go to school, I was as fearful as a field mouse about to dash from under a rock, the huge sky over me threatening hawks. Nobody seemed to suspect the act of will it took me to move from hallway to step. Once out, for a moment I felt myself to be a queen stepping stately from my palace, my subjects cheering that I glorified their world by walking upon it; then I was only wretched Misskaella again, and walls and chimneys twitched and flickered when they should stay still.

I hung back from the others, their bent backs as they climbed, their turning aside to speak; now they laughed, faces pale against the slope of damp cobbles. How lucky they were, not to have gone raw like their sister!

“Do stop dawdling, Missk!” cried Tatty.

Time and again I must force myself to see that no actual wind frayed or bent the air. I feared that at any moment I would be caught up bodily and thrown high away, or dissolved grain by grain up into this invisible wind. Surely my mind would break
soon from seeing this, from seeing through the skin of things to the flesh and the bone, to the breath gusting through and the blood pouring about? I would die of it, or fall into some kind of terrible fit. For the first time I was seeing life truly, and the truth would overwhelm me; a person couldn’t bear this sight for long—a girl of nine should not be
expected
to bear it. Look at the power all but bursting from every cobblestone and grain of grit between! See how it was loosed in dribs and drabs so measuredly, moss crawling there in a corner, a schoolboy here running along his lane to join us, his greetings peeping within the roar-that-was-not-a-roar. Oh, the sky! I was glad of the clouds, the glowering light, for they seemed to my timid eyes to contain this ongoing event, though another, fresh-born, braver Misskaella behind those eyes knew that cloud or clearness was nothing to the purposeful flaring. It would leap regardless, pushed on outward by the forces from below.

The schoolhouse stood as solidly dreadful as ever, in a sea of children whirling excitedly, throwing off almost visible whoops and cries. The bell rang, and its chimes sent a ripple through the air, which crossed and combined with the energy fountaining from below, and flew off as bright curling streamers into the gray.

Inside, all day, my mind’s flames kept burning up the world, never consuming it; its winds howled and yet moved nothing and took nothing away. Each action and object in this tiny schoolroom seemed a marvel to me—Mister Wexford so certain of himself, the rows of us so willingly chanting this, imagining that, writing the other thing upon our slates. At moments everything’s
solidity quite gave way, and the schoolhouse seemed constructed of dream matter, plastered with illusion, the heavy desks as liable as all the rest to be snatched up and scattered into the sky. When would I fall in the fit or faint that would end this?

That afternoon I waded through the spangled air and handled all the dazzling objects necessary to completing my chores. When they all were done, “I am going down the town,” I told Bee, “to walk on the mole, if Mam asks.”

“Very well,” said Bee from inside her book on her bed. I had chosen to tell her because she was the most distracted sister, and the least likely to find another chore for me, or to insist on coming too.

I let myself out of the flickering house. Outside, cobbles and houses shuddered, rain spat and the clouds glared; the air was bitter, empty of spring promise. I descended the town all eyes and ears and goosefleshed skin. I stayed composed, though I felt like running, leaping with the leaping stuff, calling out, encouraging it and being encouraged.